FEF 1907 -- 2007

Miss Fry died last week, just a few days shy of her 100th birthday. Frances Elizabeth (Betty) Fry, as the obituary called her, taught at my high school for nearly 30 years and was also assistant headmistress while I was there. She retired the same year that I graduated.

Miss Fry was formidable. You just knew not to cross her. She was tiny and wore tweed suits and sensible shoes, combed but not styled hair, and no makeup. She looked fierce but had a twinkle in her eye, almost always.

She didn't walk so much as rush, always bent at an angle from the ankles. She had good posture, but the angle helped her get places that much faster. She had a good reputation as a teacher of western European history, though I don't think I was lucky enough to take one of her classes.

She lived with another teacher, Miss Robertson, tall, with white hair always pinned into a bun. Miss Robertson was British and I was lucky enough to take one of her math classes, Algebra II, I believe.

Everyone felt relieved that Miss Robertson and Miss Fry had a housemate in each other, because after all, they were single and childless and probably lonesome. No one dared think what has now become the obvious; I didn't even think it until fewer than ten years ago. (And this at a girls' school where it was every administrator's nightmare; in fact, one of my classmates had a five-year relationship with one of our teachers through graduation and into the second year of college. It was treated as a total crisis whent he administration found out). But it was well known and a respected fact that Miss Fry and Miss Robertson were close friends.

Perhaps one of my favorite stories about Miss Fry concerned our senior prank. The previous year's prank was lame -- a bunch of seniors did the bunny hop through an all-school assembly. Cute, but come on, did they come up with this five minutes before the prank deadline?

Our prank was long thought-out and a lot of fun. Breaking all, or at least many, rules, we managed to break into the school at night (how many people break *into* school) and spent the night there. We convinced the janitor that there were meetings going on that no one had told him about, so he unlocked a lot of doors, making things much easier for us. Apparently, there was no alarm and little to no night security.

We hung out in our PJs and ate snacks and took the time to really be with each other in a way that was impossible when classes were going on. And we "decorated" -- nothing that caused permanent damage, but it involved a lot of balloons and crepe paper, especially strung between the lockers at about chest or waist height.

The next morning, Miss Mercer, our perpetually cranky bookstore manager came in early and got to work on her floor, snipping and clearing away all the detritus as fast as her little scissors could work. And of course, she grumbled all the while.

Miss Fry walked onto her floor, saw the crepe paper, and hunkered down, speeding towards her office but not tearing one piece. And as I recall, she was smiling all the while.

I hope that Miss Fry's last 30 years were pleasant and easy, that she was surrounded by friends and new generations of visiting girls (I know that some classes conducted an oral history with her.) I hope she got to twinkle and smile a lot and that in the end, she felt peace.